Beverly
Padgett believes in miracles.When
her daughter Oceana came home from Albany School of Humanities
one day with a handprint on her neck, Padgett decided it
was the last straw. “There was so much trouble up there
with kids fighting and hitting each other, pushing people
down the stairs,” Padgett says. “My baby came home with
so many bruises on her, if I had done it, they would have
called Child Protective on me.”

Padgett was also concerned with reports from Oceana’s teachers
stating that her daughter was not reading up to grade level.

“She
was doing bad and she had been there since pre-k,” Padgett
says. “Then she got into the third grade and they tell me
she can’t read and they want to keep her back. All they
kept talking about was holding her back, not giving her
help. She was supposed to be in these resource rooms, but
it wasn’t doing anything.”

Observing
the success her granddaughters appeared to be having at
New Covenant Charter School, which had opened in 1999, Padgett
applied for her daughter’s enrollment at New Covenant. Oceana
began classes in 2001, and Padgett began to see improvements
shortly thereafter.

“For
one thing she had a very, very involved teacher, Miss Perkins,”
Padgett says. “If Oceana had problems with something, she’d
keep her after school and help her out with the work she
needed. Not only that, New Covenant offered a longer school
day and a more intense curriculum, and she didn’t have to
take a bus out of her community. I’m trying to get the rest
of the grandkids in there.”

Since entering her daughter in New Covenant, Padgett is
no longer concerned with Oceana’s physical safety. She praises
the defined equality provided by the three variations on
the school’s navy-blue-and-white uniform, and the enforced
uniformity of New Covenant’s mechanistic inter-class travel.

“Wearing
the uniforms, everybody is the same as everyone else. No
one is picking on anyone else. Everybody looks the same
and that is the best thing about it,” Padgett says. “They
walk down the hall a certain number of inches apart with
their hands folded in front of them, no pushing and no shoving.
They all march together.”

While Padgett praises the assembly-line curriculum and standards
of behavior provided by her daughter’s new school—the first
charter school in the city of Albany—New Covenant, and other
publicly funded schools run for profit by private companies,
have their share of critics.

Though some view charter schools like New Covenant as the
potential saviors of struggling school systems, others see
them as a dangerous step toward abandoning existing public
schools.

Advocates say these schools, individually charted educational
institutions that are publicly funded but privately managed,
offer opportunities for innovation and creativity in the
classroom, which they allege are stifled in public schools
by government bureaucracy. But critics claim charter schools
drain resources from school districts as a whole for the
benefits of a few.

“The
overriding question is whether schooling is seen as a public
good,” says Alfie Kohn, an education researcher and coeditor
of the anthology Education Inc. “I fear that charter
schools may be a step in the direction of defining it as
a private good. It is a commodity to be purchased for my
children and the hell with everyone else. It tends to fragment
and divide communities, rather than pulling us together
to think about what makes sense for all of our children.”

But for the community of concerned parents, optimistic administrators
and idealistic educators who believed in the school’s mission,
the opening of New Covenant (which began teaching grades
k-five, and since has expanded to k-eight) was testimony
to both the desire for an alternative to the city’s public
school system and a willingness to seek that end despite
the criticism.

Keeping
the faith: Ward DeWitt. Photo
by Leif Zurmuhlen

“The
school was sponsored by the growing dissatisfaction of about
600 families here in the community who felt their educational
needs were not being met,” says Ward DeWitt, cochair of
the New Covenant board of trustees. “Children were failing
and parents were frustrated for one reason or another. They
were looking forward to something different. The goal that
we started with was to find the keys for these children
to unlock that unbridled thirst for knowledge in a nurturing
atmosphere, which was not present for many of these families
in the schools that they were involved in.”

Debate about the impact charter schools have on the public
school system is expansive, but there is no arguing that
New Covenant, one of Albany’s two charter schools, has had
its troubles. The school opened and operated for an entire
year before its permanent building was ready for use. During
the year when New Covenant classes were held in modular
trailers off of Third Street, its students scored lowest
districtwide on New York state reading and writing tests.
And the financial difficulties of its then-management company,
Advantage Schools, delayed construction of the school long
enough that the Charter School Institute—the branch of the
State University of New York that supervises charter schools—placed
New Covenant on probation and threatened to revoke its charter.
Though New Covenant has been referred to as the “Miracle
on Lark Street,” its first year seemed less a miracle than
a curse.

With the New Covenant board of trustees on the verge of
ending its relationship with Advantage Schools, the nation’s
largest educational management firm, Edison Schools Inc.,
made New Covenant an offer: The company, which manages approximately
150 schools educating 80,000 students nationwide, offered
a $13 million loan to complete construction of the school
building in return for being hired to manage New Covenant.
The offer was accepted, and Edison began managing New Covenant
in 2000.

But Edison, too, is having its troubles. In the past year,
the company has seen its market worth fizzle and its accounting
practices questioned by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
As the mountain of bad press and critical academic research
piles higher, it seems the company could use a management
firm of its own. Times looked so dire for Edison at one
point a few months back that the Charter School Institute
advised all schools contracted with Edison to consider how
to manage their schools should the company go belly-up.

Members of the New Covenant board of trustees said they
are in preliminary stages of putting together a plan to
keep the school running should Edison Schools fail.

In July 2001, Edison Schools received an uncontested bid
from Charles Zogby, the Secretary of Education for the state
of Pennsylvania, to evaluate the Philadelphia school district.
Many claimed Edison should not have been allowed to review
the schools, considering the company was looking to run
them.

“The
state hired Edison to do an assessment of the Philadelphia
school system without competitive bidding,” says Chris Lubienski,
professor of historical, philosophical and comparative studies
in education at Iowa State University. “They just hired
Edison, who did an evaluation, and surprise, surprise: They
found that the schools were failing and they needed to hire
Edison.”

The alleged chicanery sparked the interest of the U.S. Department
of Education, but it eventually deemed the case a state
matter and turned it down. The matter remains unresolved;
Pennsylvania’s auditor general is continuing the case. But
the backdoor deal left a bad impression in Philadelphia,
and Edison was awarded contracts to fewer than half of the
district’s schools. That translated to less than half of
the financial adrenaline boost that investors wanted to
see, given the company’s ailing finances at the time. And
even Edison will admit to that.

“Wall
Street was expecting Edison to win a contract for roughly
45 schools, and we got about half that,” says Adam Tucker,
Edison spokesman. “Wall Street is all about expectations.
We think it simply had an adverse reaction to our stock,
and the rest of the market overreacted.”

Edison’s stock plummeted during the past year from nearly
$30 a share to as low as 14 cents. But the drop in stock
price did not result from a general distrust of the stock
market. Many argue that it was due to a general distrust
of Edison.

“Some
people have called them the educational Enron,” says Lubienski.
“From the beginning, there was a lot of hype about what
Edison might do, but they still have yet to turn a profit.
They are several years down the line and their investors
are getting edgy.”

The Philadelphia debacle, coupled with the SEC’s inquiry
into the company’s accounting practices earlier this year,
scarred Edison’s financial well-being enough to send investors
fleeing. But Tucker says it was just a misunderstanding.

“When
Edison reported revenue, we would report gross revenue,
all the revenue that we received,” Tucker says. “It has
no impact on our bottom lines. It was an accounting technicality.”

The technicality was to the tune of about $154 million,
according to The New York Times. The Times reported
on May 15 that of the “roughly $376 million in revenue that
Edison reported . . . $154 million had never landed in Edison’s
bank account.” The company was reporting as revenue money
given to it by school districts for expenses like teacher
salaries, busing and food costs, but Edison’s revenue-reporting
practices, according to the Times, “had no effect
on its profits—or more accurately, its losses.”

While Edison’s financial troubles may eventually be chalked
up as signs of the times, there also is much debate on the
company’s performance in the educational arena. Several
studies critical of Edison have been released in the past
few years; each has been countered by press releases and/or
full-page ads in The New York Times from Edison,
rebutting what they say is malicious rumor. But according
to one researcher, Edison will go further than buying ad
space when it deems necessary.

“Edison
tried to sue my university, and it held up our report for
over six months,” says Gary Miron, principal research associate
at the Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University.
Though Tucker says these events took place before he signed
on with Edison, Miron, who coauthored An Evaluation of
Student Achievement in Edison Schools Opened in 1995 and
1996, says Edison officials tried to stop the release
of his findings because they weren’t pleased with the results.

Miron set out to verify if students enrolled in the company’s
schools make the large achievement gains that Edison’s annual
reports repeatedly indicate. The study states that students
in the Edison schools he studied often lag behind district
performance and almost always perform below state levels.
But Miron says finding that information wasn’t very easy,
as Edison often refuses to release information on its students’
achievements to researchers.

“For
me, if it is going to be researched, it has to be verifiable
and replicable, which means somebody else can take the data
and run an analysis and hopefully they’re going to come
up with the same results,” Miron says. “All of our data
is there; the method section clearly spelled out how we
did the ratings. This is research. We can’t see that with
Edison’s. You look at the charts in their annual performance
reports, and we don’t know how they count, we don’t know
how they do that. Now marketing is another thing.”

Though a number of studies side in opposition to Edison,
the company claims that a recent federal study trumps the
rest. A report released on Oct. 29 by the General Accounting
Office says existing academic literature, including Miron’s
study, is insufficient to make an accurate assessment of
the educational success or failure of schools run by for-profit
management firms. But Miron argues it isn’t the findings
of the various studies that the GAO report had problems
with, but the methods with which those studies arrived at
their conclusions.

“The
GAO set the bar very high. In the end, they said only one
study was of sufficient quality,” says Miron. “The one that
the GAO said was up to snuff, this one found that Edison
was not holding up to their promise. They found that Edison
was doing slightly worse than the control group. The GAO
should have said there are four other studies that did not
have as good statistical controls, but all of those four
studies found the same thing.”

It is a wonder, even to those who the company claims are
out to get it, that many academic studies show Edison schools
are performing remotely close to comparison groups.

Both Miron and Lubienski agree that Edison presents a well-rounded
and cutting-edge educational model. Its curriculum is stacked
with some of the most lauded ideas in educational research,
including Johns Hopkins University’s highly touted Success
for All reading program and a renowned math program designed
at the University of Chicago. Classrooms in New Covenant
are equipped with sleek, jet-black IBM personal computers.
Families with children in grades three and above are eligible
to take home a computer for the duration of their child’s
education with an Edison school.

“Edison
has a good model. It is a sincere model, meant for the whole
student,” Miron says. “Just looking at their model, common
sense tells me that they’d be doing better than comparison
groups, and the big question is: Why aren’t they?”

But Lubienski has two words for another aspect of Edison
Schools’ approach: cookie cutter.

“One
of the ideas behind charter schools is one size doesn’t
fit all, you know,” Lubienski says. “What works in one neighborhood
and with one group of kids, doesn’t necessarily work with
these others. But Edison is promoting its curriculum as
a best practice, so one size does fit all where they’re
concerned. A kid could leave an Edison school in one state
and find it pretty much the same in another. How effective
is it as far as student achievement? That’s controversial.”

But Tucker counters that Edison offers variations on its
theme.

“There
is a model,” Tucker says, “but the beauty is that it is
customizable. Edison is hired to help the board achieve
its vision, but you walk into an Edison school across the
country and they look very different. We have huge amounts
of play. It is not cookie cutter at all.”

But Lubienski says that “customizable” runs counter to the
company’s economic approach.

“One
of the big incentives for Edison to get involved in this
to begin with was for the economies of scale,” Lubienski
explains. “If they managed enough schools, they could save
money, and that is where their profit margin would be. Part
of generating economies of scale means employing standardized
practices. They are not going to let local school managers
try different things in different areas. They just apply
the standard Edison curriculum. That is how they save money.”

And from the very beginning, making money has clearly been
the goal of Edison and its founders. The company was formed
in 1992 as the brainchild of Chris Whittle, who’d already
made a fortune from an endeavor as loathed as it was profitable:
Channel One, which broadcasts a “free” news program with
reports on issues affecting teenagers in exchange for the
undivided attention of 8 million students in 12,000 schools
nationwide—which the company then sells to advertisers for
a bundle.

“Since
Channel One was so successful at that time, he thought he
could do similar things with schools—bring marketing-style
practices into the provision of education and make a profit
out of it,” Lubienski says. “And that upset a lot of people.
His intention wasn’t to educate kids. It was to sell Snickers
bars to make the endeavor profitable. He wasn’t embraced
right away by a lot of educators because he was bringing
self-interest into education, a field where a lot of people
see themselves as philanthropic.”

Edison’s business priorities were made apparent to New Covenant
school officials during the 2001-02 school year, when Edison
let New Covenant know that enrollment at the school needed
to increase in order to show prospective investors that
the school was growing and thus making Edison stock a worthwhile
venture. And it was that cents-before-sensibility ideal
that drove New Covenant’s last principal, a highly respected
local educator, to quit.

Though Eleanor Bartlett speaks highly of the opportunities
New Covenant provides, it takes only a breath for her to
switch to criticism of what she has experienced in an Edison-run
school. After an extended career encompassing various positions
throughout the Albany City School District and a seat on
the state Board of Regents, Bartlett became principal of
New Covenant around the time Edison was hired to manage
it.

Bartlett says that the education of the children at the
school is compromised by Edison’s focus on the bottom line.
Edison’s desire to boost enrollment numbers translates into
overcrowded classrooms, she says, which can lead to less-individualized
attention for students. Bartlett explains that the first
year she arrived at the school, enrollment was 350. The
second year it was up to 720. She says Edison’s goal for
New Covenant is to pack 900 children into the school by
next year.

“So
every year is a start-up year because you’ve got all these
kids coming in and you can’t settle down to do anything,”
Bartlett says. “Maybe there are other ways of paying for
the building that are better than adding more children to
pay for it.

“I
went to the board in December and basically pleaded with
them to find other ways to pay for the school without bringing
in all the extra children,” Bartlett continues. “And that
next month they unanimously voted to bring in the kids.
Going to that board and the whole board votes against you,
I felt there was no reason to go on. You think there is
a cavalry behind you and you turn around and there is nobody
but you.”

Bartlett also has taken issue with the Edison curriculum,
as she has witnessed both teachers and students struggle
with the company’s challenging educational model.

“Their
curriculum is very structured,” Bartlett says. “In every
curriculum, there is some flexibility for creativity, but
Edison’s is very scripted. It is a good curriculum, but
in order to be real successful with it, you have to have
a good foundation. And if they don’t have a good foundation,
they’re going to have difficulty.”

After some waffling, Bartlett retired from her post as principal.
Soon thereafter, she discovered that her willingness to
fight for the best interests of the school’s children—rather
than those of a corprate board on Fifth Avenue—had not gone
unnoticed.

Caught
in the middle: students at New Covenant.
Photo by Leif Zurmuhlen

Bartlett
says a number of New Covenant parents asked her to continue
in a leadership role with the school by filling a vacancy
on the board of trustees. She was appointed, and continues
in that position today, hoping that the mounting criticism
of Edison doesn’t taint the school and community that has
formed around it.

“There
is a lot of potential there, and if we find the right way
of doing this it can be a great place,” Bartlett says. “There
is such a sense of community, and it does offer parents
whose children are failing or at risk of failing an alternative.
And if nothing else, it creates competition among schools,
so they don’t get complacent.”

Bartlett emphasizes her enthusiasm and hope for New Covenant’s
mission.

“This,
from the start, was a community-type school with parental
involvement,” Bartlett says. “A lot of times what was happening
was a lot of the kids are coming to us two or three grade
levels behind. Parents were finding out that their children
couldn’t read. They were saying, ‘We want another choice.’
”

On Wednesdays during the school year, Beverly Padgett’s
daughter Oceana takes part in Delicate Diamonds, New Covenant’s
female social club.

“They
teach little girls how to be young ladies,” Padgett explains.
“They plant vegetables in the community garden, have bake
sales to raise funds for field trips outside of school.
On the 25th of this month they’re going down to Equinox
to volunteer their time in the community to help feed the
homeless. It’s a cool little group.”

Oceana has been involved with the Delicate Diamonds, a feminine
counterpart to the school’s Distinguished Gentlemen’s set,
for two years, and Padgett is pleased with the manners,
etiquette and allowance management her daughter continues
to learn. Children at the school can also involve themselves
in the chess and TV-writers clubs, and New Covenant junior
varsity basketball and cheerleading are to begin this winter.
And by their nature, the charter school attracts a committed
group of adults.

“The
school has called for more community involvement, and we
have quite a few loyal parents and teachers involved in
fund-raisers and community activities,” says Padgett, who
recently accepted a nomination as parent representative
on the New Covenant board of trustees. “The school being
right there, right down the street, it is that much easier
for me to keep tabs on how Oceana is progressing.”

Padgett reports that Oceana is making progress in New Covenant,
and the school’s test scores suggest that she may not be
alone. Though New Covenant initially fared worse than schools
in the Albany City School District on New York’s standardized
English tests, the school’s scores have steadily increased
over the last three years, which is not true of the district
average.

While the school’s board of trustees have yet to finalize
a contingency plan in the event of Edison’s demise, its
members try to be as reassuring as possible. But there are
concerns that should Edison go bankrupt, creditors will
line up for returns on their investments: the books, the
technology—possibly the school itself.

“There
is certain information that we need to know as a board before
we even go ahead with a contingency plan,” Bartlett says.
“For instance, what do we own and what does Edison own?
If Edison goes bankrupt, what happens? We don’t know that.
You’ve got to know those kinds of things before you even
get to a contingency plan.”

Though Bartlett, Padgett and DeWitt have various concerns
about the future of the school, they and other members of
the New Covenant community continue to express faith in
their new covenant, knowing that without it, the “Miracle
on Lark Street” could prove much less than miraculous.

“It
is new, it is unique, and hopefully it will provide some
innovative approaches to this thing we call education, and
we can see them replicated or picked up in the public school
system at large,” DeWitt says. “The goal is not to compete
with public schools, but to try to find the answers to moving
our children forward. The education of our children, wherever
they are, is probably the most important mission of all
of our communities.”